I’ve mentioned this numerous times before, but The Polyglot Developer is powered by Hugo which is a static site generator that takes Markdown and converts it to HTML. While Markdown is easy to use and can accomplish quite a bit, the syntax doesn’t accomplish everything that you’d hope to accomplish when it comes to a website. For example audio and video aren’t a thing in Markdown while it is in HTML. So how do you add custom components to a Hugo article?

In Hugo, you can create what is called a shortcode, which is a custom tag that gets processed differently than standard Markdown syntax. We’re going to see how to create shortcodes to take Hugo posts and pages to the next level.

As you may already know, The Polyglot Developer is a statically generated website built with Hugo. That means that there are no databases involved, no server side languages, only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

In the past I shared the automated Gulp workflow that I use when building my blog to maintain performance and a solid standing with search engine optimization (SEO).

I received a request from a subscriber recently around affiliate link generation on a Hugo website and I figured it would be an interesting topic to tackle. Typically a WordPress plugin or similar would handle the job, but since we’re working with a static website, we have to be inventive with our build scripts.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to build a Gulp task that will replace all Amazon links with Amazon Associates links, which is another name for their affiliate program.

As you may or may not know, The Polyglot Developer is currently using Hugo, which is a static site generator. When getting started with Hugo, the themes and documentation don’t say much when it comes to having more than one possible author producing content.

For example, as mentioned in my previous article, this site is always accepting guest contributions for technical content. There have been several tutorials contributed, but when it comes to credit, I want these tutorials to show under the authors name, not my name just because I’m the owner of the blog.

We’re going to see how to work with data templates in Hugo to create and use different authors for different articles.

As you may remember, I recently released The Polyglot Developer 2.0 which was a migration from WordPress to Hugo. Because my WordPress permalinks matched a similar format to Hugo I didn’t have to make too many changes. However, there was an issue with the category and tag taxonomies. In Hugo these were recommended to be plural, while in WordPress they were singular.

I’m currently using Apache for hosting The Polyglot Developer so I had to figure out how to redirect the previous WordPress traffic to prevent bad links which would hurt the search engine optimization (SEO) of my blog. We’re going to see how I made such redirects happen.

You might not know this, but I run another blog on a completely different subject material than The Polyglot Developer. This other blog is called Own the Web and it focuses on brand building, searching engine optimization, and boosting your online revenue through the internet. Unlike The Polyglot Developer, Own the Web was actually created using the Hugo Static Website Engine.

I want to share information about Hugo, some of the advantages and disadvantages, and my experience using it.